A new website is just the beginning

The website

We are excited to publish a major update to the British Birds website. This is the beginning of a series of improvements to our digital offering.

It starts with bringing together all elements of the British Birds family – Journal, Rarities Committee and Charitable Trust. This provides the foundations we need to develop the website and add the new features and additional content that we know birders want.

The site isn’t perfect, but it is a significant step in the right direction. We wanted to bring you an improved experience as soon as possible. And now that we’ve started this process we are committed to a programme of continued improvements. With 116 years of journal content and decades of rare bird information, you will appreciate that this will take time so please bear with us.

What's changed

One of the most obvious changes is that the website is no longer just focused on the Journal. It now includes separate sections for the Rarities Committee and Charitable Trust. The previous BBRC website is no longer available and anyone trying to access it be will be redirected to this site.

We have focused most of our efforts around changing and improving how the Journal works online. Here is a summary of the most notable changes:

• Issues – browse all issues by year and view individual articles as a web page or how they appear in the print journal with the new issue view. Currently we’ve added issue view back to 2019 but will be adding more over the coming weeks
• Articles – all articles are listed under one page and can be filtered by category (e.g. BB eye, Main paper, News and comment) and year. There is also a dedicated article search. The filters and search can be used in combination to quickly find the content you are looking for.
• Collections – this feature allows you to save individual articles to any number of collections that you want to create. This will enable you to build your own library of British Birds content. For example, you might want to create a collection for favourite articles, one for identification articles, and another for rare bird articles. To get started simply click the star icon at the top of any article page.

What we are still working on

Whilst we’ve made a good start on getting the website where we want it to be, there are some areas that we’ve haven’t progressed as much as we had hoped to. 

Search function

With so much content available the search function is a hugely important part of the website. And we know this is one of the key areas that you want improved. It’s also one of the more difficult areas to crack. We don’t after all have Google’s budgets! The new articles page is the start of a better way of finding the content you want. We will be adding to this with a more refined search process, additional features and better tagging of content.

Individual article formatting

When comparing to the previous website, considerable improvements have been made to the quality of the formatting on individual articles. However, there is still much to do. Over the coming months we will be working through all articles (starting with the most recent) to get them up to the standard that we have set, and you rightly expect.

The app

The British Birds app was terribly neglected, and usage had dropped to very low levels. We therefore decided to close the app and as of today it will stop working. We have been working on a new app and it will be available in both the Android and Apple stores from this autumn. It will work seamlessly with the website, delivering both article and issue views. The latter allowing you to read the journal in the same format as the print edition. Your collections (see above for details) will sync between website and app. And you will be able to download both articles and issues to read offline.

Your feedback

We welcome comments and feedback, and if you do find something that isn’t working as expected please email support@britishbirds.co.uk.

If you have questions about your subscription, the printed journal, shop orders, or any other matters relating to British Birds please continue to contact Hazel at subscriptions@britishbirds.co.uk.

Thank you

Finally, we would like to say thank you for supporting British Birds. Your subscription enables us to keep producing the quality content we know that birders want. It also helps support the British Birds Rarities Committee and British Birds Charitable Trust.